- 20 children, six adults and the shooter are dead after shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut
- Gov. Malloy: “A number of our citizens, beautiful children, had their life taken away from them”
- Below are the latest updates as they come to us or you can read our story of the Connecticut school shooting
[Updated at 8:58 p.m. ET] Denise Correia says her daughter, a Sandy Hook Elementary second-grader who was not injured, heard the gunshots from the classroom she was in. The girl, while talking about the shooting with Correia, has been mentioning slain principal Dawn Lafferty Hochsprung “quite a lot.”
“I think everyone’s coping as best as they possibly can,” Correia told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “I’m letting her talk. She’s mentioned quite a bit about the principal, who many of us have worked with. I adored her. I worked with her personally with my business. That is one person I know we have lost on a personal level.”
Correia said she has heard that her daughter’s teacher, when the gunfire started, grabbed two kids from the hallway, put them into her classroom with other students, locked the door and gathered the students to a side of the room away from the gunfire. “She did a very heroic thing,” Correia said of the teacher.
“The kids are going to suffer from this,” Correia said. “… We lost a lot of babies today in this town, and there are a lot of very sad families.”
[Updated at 8:20 p.m. ET] One injured victim, a female employee of the school, is “doing well,” Connecticut State Police Lt. J. Paul Vance said.
[Updated at 7:53 p.m. ET] The public release of the victims’ names may come on Saturday morning, Connecticut State Police Lt. J. Paul Vance says.
Vance said investigators have made preliminary identifications of the bodies, and that they’ve notified the appropriate families. But investigators want to make final, positive identifications before releasing the names to the media.
“It’s a horrific scene,” Vance said. “Between our mutual experience, we’ve never seen anything like this.”
Vance said the next briefing from state police would be at 8 a.m. ET Saturday.
[Updated at 7:48 p.m. ET] U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Connecticut, says her thoughts and prayers are with the families.
“This really hits close to home,” said DeLauro, who said she is visiting her grandchildren in Washington, D.C. “These beautiful young angels who had so much to live for – and it seems so senseless. Unthinkable that this could happen ,but it has, and now, as the president said, we come together, we wrap our arms around these families and hold them close to our hearts.”
[Updated at 7:10 p.m. ET] Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, offered his prayers for the families of those affected by the Connecticut shooting, according to a release from the group.
The shooting “wrenches the hearts of all people,” he said.
“Once again we speak against the culture of violence infecting our country even as we prepare to welcome the Prince of Peace at Christmas,” Dolan said. “All of us are called to work for peace in our homes, our streets and our world, now more than ever.”
[Updated at 6:51 p.m. ET] A law enforcement official familiar with the investigation says the three guns found at the shooting site were legally purchased by Nancy Lanza, the mother of the suspect in the shooting.
According to the law enforcement official, the Glock and Sig Sauer handguns were found inside the school with the deceased gunman. The Bushmaster was found in a car outside the school. The official did not know if the car was registered to the gunman, to his mother or to someone else.
The official echoed what other law enforcement officials have told CNN: That Adam Lanza was the suspected gunman, and that he died at the scene of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot.
[Updated at 6:44 p.m. ET] Three U.S. law enforcement officials, from different agencies, separately tonight identified the suspected shooter as Adam Lanza, contrary to what investigators had said previously. It is not clear what caused the confusion among investigators.
His older brother, Ryan, was taken into custody for general questioning from a home in Hoboken, New Jersey. Officials did not label Ryan Lanza as a suspect. It is unclear when he may be released.
One of the officials say Adam’s father was also taken in for similar questioning. There is no indication that the father will be charged. The official noted the father has remarried and lives with his new wife in a residence in the general area of Connecticut not too far from where his ex-wife lived.
[Updated at 6:43 p.m. ET] CNN’s Susan Candiotti is talking to investigators at the scene as they piece together exactly what happened and when. She says she’s learned that the mother of the suspected shooter, Nancy Lanza, was found dead in the suspect’s home in Newtown.
“Earlier we had information that she was found in the classroom. However, now I’m being told that in fact her body was found at the suspect’s residence,” Candiotti said. “We don’t know whether she also lived there. We also don’t know the timeline – when was she killed? Was she killed before the shooting began at the school? These are the things that authorities are still trying to piece together.”
[Updated at 6:02 p.m. ET] “Evil visited this community today,” Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy just told reporters in Newtown. “And it’s too early to speak of recovery, but each parent, each sibling, each member of the family has to understand that Connecticut – we’re all in this together.
“We’ll do whatever we can to overcome this event. We will get through it. But this is a terrible time for this community and these families.”
[Updated at 5:14 p.m. ET] The mother of the suspected shooter was found dead in her son’s residence in Newtown, a law enforcement source with detailed knowledge of the investigation told CNN. CNN had previously identified the mother as Nancy Lanza, a teacher at the Sandy Hook Elementary, according to law enforcement sources.
The source also told CNN there was no body found in the house searched by authorities in Hoboken, New Jersey. Two law enforcement sources say a man was taken away from questioning from that house. He is believed to be the brother of the shooter, according to the sources.
The first law enforcement source says the school shooter was dressed in “black battle fatigues and a military vest.”
The Bushmaster .223 found at the scene is a semi automatic weapon, the source says. Two other weapons found were handguns, a Sig-Sauer and a Glock.